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The chapter gives a short but extensive autobiography of Friedrich List. He contributed greatly to the movement for economic and political unification of Germany. He was mostly remembered as a promoter of the railroad. He considered the railroad as an essential precondition for Germany's economic unification. Even when he was young, he shared the ideas and values of political and cultural nationalists which can be shown clearly by his reform plans for the German confederation. List was an ideologist of industrialism and industrialization. He was the only thinker who welcomed the Industrial Revolution and its political, social, and cultural consequences. He called for reform and not revolution. He wanted to give the Germans a new life and a sense of purpose. The last major cause that he participated in was the movement for raising the Zollverein tariff to stimulate industrial growth.

This chapter explains how, after Napoleon's invasions, the synthesis of formality and collegiality collapsed under civil society's separation from the state. The scribes ceased to function as a mediating class and instead became the agents of administrative colonization. The impressive jump in the incomes of New Württemberg Schreiber can be attributed to the massive adjustments inherent in a change of regime: Vielschreiberei resulted when the scribes applied a battery of new textual formalities to localities previously unaccustomed to them. The constitutional discourse of the Good Old Law hindered a greater political unity by poisoning the mutual relationships binding government and people with defensiveness and suspicion. Friedrich List's writings defined the new role formality should play in modern civic culture. List's publications represented the emancipation of writing from all aspects of the scribes' influence; they gave a voice to a civil society now fully liberated from textual serfdom.

According to Engels, Marx was a “Marxist” when he wrote the “Hegel Critique”. Marx diagnosed the anatomy, morphology, and the dynamics of German society and drew specific guidelines to be used there. He was able to formulate a program that would launch a new stage in the history of humanity. As per Evans, Marx wrote his critique of List in March 1845. It was only at that time that Marx began to study the problems of the political economy. The “Hegel Critique” is the first work of Marx that did not mention the Friedrich List. It was where Marx spoke of the proletarian class for the first time. He was concerned with the backwardness of Germany. He dealt with anachronism. He linked the German Revolution to the French Revolution. He was after the abolition of the state. The “Hegel Critique” was the closest amongst all his works to advancing the idea of national communism.

Beginning with a discussion of the historical criticisms of American protectionism, this chapter moves quickly into a systematic review of the origins and arguments of protectionist political economy. The popularity and political influence of protectionism is indicated by the emergence of America as a bastion of nineteenth-century tariffs. Protectionism dominated nineteenth-century American economic discourse and was the essential expression of antebellum hybrid capitalism. By incorporating American exceptionalism, encouraging industrialization, celebrating the harmony between capital and labor, and pursuing methodological and theoretical values that were accepted across American culture, protectionism is presented as the most authentic manifestation of the antebellum economic mind. The economic ideologies of Alexander Hamilton, Matthew Carey, Daniel Raymond, Calvin Colton, and Friedrich List are explored. Each emphasized a nationalist concern in political economy, connecting political independence, especially from Britain, to national economic sovereignty.

This chapter focuses on the claim that the advance of the international division of labour has served, will serve, or perhaps should serve, to constrain military conflict between states. The plausibility of this claim is based on the ascendancy of a certain way of thinking about the rise of market economies in their relationship with the modern state, often associated with the work of Adam Smith and his nineteenth-century disciples. The chapter considers the work of Smith and that of his greatest critic, German political economist, Friedrich List. List’s critique of what he termed ‘cosmopolitical economy’ confronted the paradoxical possibility that peace would only reshape international rivalries, not negate them.

This chapter turns to the institutional reforms undertaken by the Württemberg government in response to the campaign against the scribes, and to the very different ways civil society was conceptualized in the bureaucratic arena Friedrich List had left behind. It tries to track reformers' evolution from edict to enforcement, for their sociographic efforts provide the best account possible of why the Schreiberei had become such a detested institution. Moreover, the methods by which the state met the scribes' material needs are evaluated. The chapter picks up where many administrative histories leave off: after the promulgation of edicts and the reorganization of official powers. It also illustrates how entrepreneurial rivals to the scribes cut into the scribes' former monopolies to pursue their own career paths—and did so independently. Despite their limited practical impact, the commission bureaus point to a deeper fascination with administrative knowledge as a vehicle of influence.

This chapter examines the classical tradition in economics that emerged after the death of David Ricardo. Following Ricardo's death, there was some systemic dissent, mainly from French, German, and American scholars, against the great truths emanating from the British economic scene. In addition, there were changes and refinements in the theory of prices and distribution—in how prices, wages, interest, rents and profits are determined. The chapter considers the influential criticism of the founding fathers of the classical system by American, German, and French economists and their claim that the classical system may have been too conveniently British. These economists included Adam Müller and Georg Friedrich List from Germany, Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi and Pierre Joseph Proudhon from France, and Henry Charles Carey from the United States.

This chapter recounts how the global financial crisis revealed the double standards that for years had informed economic policy: Keynesianism for the rich and monetarism for the poor. Subsidies have been directed to capitalist enterprises and found their way into profits and individual bonuses. At the same time, structural adjustment and similar policies justified by macroeconomic prudence impoverished the public sector and forced cuts in services for the poor. The chapter then summarizes the difference between the policies that rich countries recommend to the poor today and those they themselves followed on the way to achieving their own development. In particular, it stresses the importance of protecting national industries to enable them to become success stories of economic development. Recalling the theories of Friedrich List, the chapter interprets the policies pressed by rich countries and the (World Trade Organization) WTO as efforts to “kick away the ladder” lest others follow them up.